'Job Adjustment Manifesto' And Drk.Follow

These DRK updates are trash. No other way to put it. The first one about the TP/Damage might be good if it works like Souleater and stacks with it. I'm talking, hits for 1000+. But that's not very likely.

The second one is f*cking terrible.

As far as the last bit your worried about, SE seems to be trolling DRK but I seriously doubt they'd nerf anything about the job. I assume they'll buff some of the less impressive Merit stuff.

Lastly, the "WS refinements" has me excited. There is a few ways they could play with the mods and/or effects of Quietus and Torcleaver that would make them competitive, without being yet another crit WS.

http://i51.photobucket.com/albums/f400/hexagramFFXI/2euhd3r.gif

Actually, a fairly viable idea IMO. All they'd have to do is make the critrate bonus on 'chance of critical hit varies with tp' weaponskills a bit better, and let all weaponskills crit at whatever your base crit rate is. Goodbye job imbalance, hello invites.

The issue right now is really one of job 'desirability'. Different jobs should do different amounts of damage, sure, but SE needs to face the issue that it seems they're holding back the damage for drk, so what do we get in exchange? Very arguably worse survival tools than most jobs? Inferior weaponskills compared to 'similar' DDs? Pathetic, completely useless nukes?

The truth is, all most groups need now is a tank, procs, and a healer. Obviously, we aren't a healer. We have possibly the least -main job- tanking ability of heavy DDs (There are contenders for less, like drg, but mnk, thf, nin (who also generally out-DD us now), war, possibly even sam are more functional tanks when it comes to anything worthwhile. )
So that leaves procs... Red procs, we have -almost- as many as war, but that doesn't change the fact that we have nothing they don't, and people are gonna get a war instead. Blue procs, nothing has a real advantage except monk or whm in blunt time. And yellow... We have tier 3 nukes? And all dark procs except dispel.

The problem isn't -just- that lots of other jobs can out-DD us, it's that they can out-DD us while also doing something useful to the group. And if all we can do is deal damage, we should be a hell of a lot better at it than we are.

Really, and this is influenced by personal bias because this is what I've always liked about the job, what I'd like to see SE do with the job is improve our ability to tank. A few things I think would help...

I've said it before, I'll say it again, a counterpartish ability to elemental celerity that reduces the recast of dark magic. Our self-healing is already pretty limited, we have poor mp pools, anything that resists darkness hard enough will put a damper on it, and undead flat-out prevent it. And on top of that, it has overly long recast times.

Another thing about drk that ended up really disappointing me, actually, was our max hp. I expected more or that, for a job whose bread and butter is playing with hp values. Maybe I'm naive, but I'd like to see drk get max hp buffed to near-monk levels, personally. Obviously, that'd buff up souleater too by it's very nature, but moreover would just give us more room to play around, because I really do think hp manipulation could be a good thing for SE to focus on for drk. Not this /store tp- for a damage boost that's probably crap' sh*t.

I agree jobs should be differentiated, but in the end there's only so many roles, and so many ways of doing those roles. The DD field is pretty oversaturated, we should stop crying to be better than X or Y and try to find our own identity.

Well, you could definitely make a point that how the game is now is not necessarily for the best, but I think it'd be better for SE to simply pay attention to what the roles the players define are as the game goes on, and try to tweak things so that any job has something that lets it fill those roles. How often they need to analyze this and how dramatic a change they should make when they do are certainly best limited, but I think it's pretty safe to say abyssea has revolutionized what people do in this game. Now I think it's up to SE to look at abyssea, look at what they plan to do with jobs going forward, and make sure that they do their best to plan around what players do. The fact is, pretty simply, that for most intents and purposes the role of straight up pure DD is dead. If all SE does for a job doing forward is to specialize a job as a DD more and more that job isn't going to go anywhere.

It's not like SE has never taken how the playerbase plays into account before. Look at ninja. It wasn't meant to be a tank job, but one day some clever bastard realized that by keeping utsusemi up and cycling them, they could keep themselves alive pretty well and not shed hate from getting hit to boot. Nowadays, SE gives ninja tanking abilities because that's what the playerbase made them into.

My point is, just being a DD is too specialized to be useful nowadays (let alone that we aren't even as good at it as we should be given our lack of other functions). This thread is very directly about SE's announced intentions regarding the job, and I'm saying that I think it's a dead-end road. Sure, abyssea isn't everything, but it isn't going anywhere, and I'm confident it will continue to be a significant enough portion of the game to be the primary force shaping the populace's mindset.

Basically, for drk to survive as a specialized DD only, they'd have to utterly wipe the floor with other jobs with more varied talents, like proccing or tanking. But as it is, they have the most drawbacks (poor mp pool, hurting themselves to add damage, etc.), and STILL get vastly outdamaged by jobs that have other reasons to get invites.

Even if we did ZOMG outdamage every other job under the sun, though, as it is it wouldn't get us nearly as many invites as a war or a mnk, because nothing we fight requires that much firepower. That's the other problem with pure-DD specialization, there's nothing with so much hp or defense that it warrants bringing along someone (who will want some of the drops) just to kill it moar. If you can have someone to hold it while the mages (/wars if you need red) proc who can also deal plenty good damage on their own, there's no reason to bring along a dedicated DD.

I see your point about this being a gamewide issue, but gamewide issues can have job-targeted solutions, so long as you make sure that no job is getting shafted in the end. I'm just concerned that the job-targeted plans SE has for drk will only sever to further pidgeonhole it into a specialized role that doesn't really exist any more.

I read this a couple times and quite honestly I couldn't agree more. At first I thought this idea for DRK becoming a bigger DD made me excited (that's if SE gets the ability and resulting damage boost right) but at the same time a straight dedicated DD is a dieing role in some ways in this post-abyssea FFXI. As a recently returning player myself I've managed to get quite a number of non-abyssea goals accomplished but as time has worn on over the past weeks I've had greater and greater trouble getting abyssea goals done. I'd go further but it's gonna turn into a Q_Q post so I'll leave it at that.